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Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

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Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#61

Post by rkaplan »

nirvana wrote: post #32

Please explain to me why a bot would click on ads? (if anyone knows) Is it crawlers crawling Facebook? Are they alleging that facebook is doing it to boost revenues? Their hypothesis seems secure, given that you can't really use the facebook site at all without javascript enabled. More alarming is Facebook holding their name for ransom for the sum of $24,000 a year!

Bots might be operated by competitors to increase the cost of advertising for Limited Pressing. This is the most likely scenario, in my opinion. However, though rather unlikely, the bots could be affiliated with Facebook itself, as all of those extra clicks translate into lots of extra Facebook revenue.

That doesn't seem like a very sustainable strategy though.

Does anyone know what kind (if any) of anti-bot measures Facebook already has in place for paid advertising?

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#62

Post by nemesisj »

sk5t wrote: post #27

We dropped the Google Display Network about a year back out of very heavy suspicion of bot malfeasance... lots of clicks from frivolous, consumer-oriented, no-name sites with obviously nothing to do with our somewhat technical, LDAP-focused product.

Yeah, I'm convinced it's setup to scam users and there's a lot of click fraud happening.

Wrote a post about it here: http://peebs.org/148437517

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#63

Post by pandog »

veyron wrote: post #3

"We built a page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we'd keep track of it. You know what we found? The 80% of clicks we were paying for were from bots." How do you tell if it's a bot? Just by user-agent string or repeated slamming by IP address, or is there some other technique?

From the article it would appear that their definition of a bot is a client with JavaScript disabled

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#64

Post by jonknee »

j45 wrote: post #7

Wow, even if this is a little true the implications are big. Is this similar, or related to other ad space inflation? I'm reminded of Google (and others)(1) sending out free $75 adwords coupons to easily allow the costs of bids to inflate since it's not my own real money (thereby increasing the percentage of real cash being made on the ads)? (1)Edited and clarified

Unless you're buying ads for popular affiliate stuff, handing new AdWord users $75 in credit doesn't have much of an effect (other than some percentage of those users going on to spend real money). I have gotten similar offers from Facebook, Twitter, Bing and a lot of othe advertising companies.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#65

Post by tptacek »

timdorr wrote: post #55
sanxiyn wrote: post #10

I didn't know Facebook charges businesses for changing the name of Facebook Page. Is this a well known fact?

Your name becomes locked after 200 likes: https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=271607792873806 For the username, everyone (including users) is allowed one name change. Presumably, Facebook can bypass these seemingly arbitrary limitations, but will essentially charge you for the right to do so (by requiring you to have purchased a certain amount of advertising with them).

This seems pretty reasonable, as the potential for abuse for arbitrary name changes is very high.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#66

Post by thlt »

reustle wrote: post #49

Copying the text just incase FB decides they don't like it --- Hey everyone, we're going to be deleting our Facebook page in the next couple of weeks, but we wanted to explain why before we do. A couple months ago, when we were preparing to launch the new Limited Run, we started to experiment with Facebook ads. Unfortunately, while testing their ad system, we noticed some very strange things. Facebook was charging us…

I didn't write an own analytic program but can confirm that 80% of clicks from my Facebook ads don't show up on my GoSquared dashboard.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#67

Post by oelmekki »

veyron wrote: post #8
vladd wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main technique is to notice a pattern that is only explainable by bot activity. Generally speaking, in addition to the patterns you mentioned (invalid user-agent strings, rapid succession of same-IP access) there are also other patterns, such as failure to load referenced CSS or image files, or 100% failure on Captcha challenges.

"failure to load referenced CSS or image files" -- is there a way for bots (in particular, mechanize in perl/python) to also download those files? "100% failure on Captcha challenges" -- are captchas generally deployed on click-through ads?

> is there a way for bots (in particular, mechanize in perl/python) to also download those files?

The point was mostly that if it is not downloaded, then it's a bot (or any non-browser getter, at least), not that it's not a bot if it does.

Or maybe you were asking for a way to avoid bot detection ? :)

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#68

Post by jotto »

One POSSIBLE explanation for what Facebook would use anonymous bots for: verifying the advertisement goes where the advertiser said it would go.

Facebook has problems with fraudulent or confusing advertisements. for example, iPad's being advertised for $2, but the user clicking the ad is sent to a penny auction site that bills you $100 when you sign up.... so that domain ends up getting banned, but those advertisers/spammers either create a new domain or they use a redirecting domain that redirects to a non fraudulent domain when they see an Facebook IP (in theory, the Facebook IP would mean it's an intern or Facebook bot checking the URL).

Here's an example of the penny auction crap http://www.fastcompany.com/1771099/facebook-spam-ads-damage-...

and an example of manipulating the landing page URL with a redirect http://www.larrylim.net/seo-online-marketing/facebook-ads-pr...

so maybe it's Facebook's engineers trying to verify the ads are going to the place they're intended to go, but they are obviously incorrectly counting them as billable clicks

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#69

Post by vegardx »

muyuu wrote: post #39
vegardx wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are talking about ads, not "likes".

I think he didn't imply that. Obviously a company with 400 likes is not a big player in the Facebook ad space, it was just a measure of popularity. Obviously the news here is not the loss of business for Facebook, but the fact that a click scam was taking place (if true).

Because they are not related. You can use them just as you would with Google Adsense. Obviously you can get a lot of free advertisement and edorsement with having people "like" you on Facebook, but that is beside of the point.

And the click scam, if true, will take away the only way for Facebook to monetize the product. Marketers are not stupid, things like this spread like wildfire.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#70

Post by thlt »

angry-hacker wrote: post #51
loumf wrote: post #31

Could it just be a badly written search spider? The ad is simply an anchor tag around an image. If you didn't filter it out specifically, you would just "click" it to get to another page.

I was thinking about it too... but then again why don't we hear the same complain from other advertisers?

I didn't write an own analytic program but can confirm that 80% of clicks from my Facebook ads don't show up on my GoSquared dashboard.
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